Jennifer Odem: Surfacing

September 18 -- December 5

511 Gallery is pleased to present Jennifer Odem: Surfacing,

with an artist’s reception from 6 to 8 p.m. 

511 Gallery is pleased to announce Jennifer Odem: Surfacing, a solo exhibition of new work by the New Orleans sculptor and drawing artist. The exhibition opens on Thursday, September 18th, with an artist’s reception from 6 to 8 p.m. 

Situated on the banks of the Mississippi River, bordered on the north by Lake Pontchartrain, the second largest inland saltwater body in the United States, and situated, on average, eight to twelve feet below sea level, New Orleans is a city entirely surrounded by water. The city’s location is precarious, and as a many-generations New Orleans native, Odem has witnessed the changes and, often, devastation wrought on its inhabitants and landscape by extreme events caused by the actions of corporations, government, and nature itself. These changes are extensive and far-reaching. The U.S. Army Corps’s diversion of the Mississippi River in 1963 was one of them. Building a diversion structure, which is the 2 billion-dollar Old River Control Structure, a massive 556-feet-long concrete and steel dam that controls the river’s flow as it moves south to the Gulf of Mexico, the Corps also constructed over 350 miles of levees, complete with floodwalls, gates, and pumps -- a project begun in 1965 and that was still ongoing when, in 2005, the winds, floodwaters, and storm surges caused by Hurricane Katrina caused 50 of the levees to burst, sending billions of gallons of water rushing into the city and leaving 80% of it underwater. 

It is the effects of such actions that Odem explores in Jennifer Odem: Surfacing, with serious consideration of alternatives but also with a sense of irony at the hubristic self-confidence of men defying the gods. Paralleling the Army Corps’s efforts have been the attempts of the communities that live on the Batture -- the land in between the low-tide levels of the Mississippi River and the levee -- to acknowledge and understand the risk involved simply by being so close to the source and force that is the Mississippi River. Their physical proximity to, and perpetual awareness of, the river’s natural movements -- its ebbs, rhythms, flooding, and flows -- has allowed the community of the Batture to exist and persist. It is that essence of a careful relationship -- one of observation, nearness, and understanding and respect for a mighty river, that guides Odem’s practice and what she aims to surface in her sculptures, paintings, and drawings.

Shrine, one of eight works on paper, is of a tall, totemic structure of six stacked objects -- looking most like concrete bird baths that owners place on their lawns -- becoming smaller as they rise to the top. This massive steeple is set against a pale blue sky and yellow, earthy ground, and is the only figure in the landscape. No birds are visible, nor is the presence of water in or out of the baths. The barrenness is the challenge of the object created. It stands not as an active religious or spiritual site, and appears to be more a reliquary, a container for the individual and perhaps venerated birdbaths, the true relics from a time when water was plentiful and safe for drinking and bathing.

Odem’s small tabletop sculpture Aquifer is ten cloth shoulder pads, cast in bronze and standing on a stone base, leaning into one another. Though once soft, when a piece of cloth in a human’s garment, they are now hardened and have developed a patina of a brilliant bright blue, with occasional speckled spots of brown erosion visible. The pads differ greatly in size, shape, and patina, and yet together, holding up each other, they become a single, cohesive, and collective form. Aquifer’s title and color speak of the sea, and the shapes of the pieces, to a viewing eye, might evoke seashells or slices of rock. It is through the objects’ displacement -- ripped away from their places of origin and made visible in the company of others -- that Odem is able to make us look twice, and with admiration, at an otherwise mundane domestic object. We then are moved to reconsider what we are seeing and thinking, which can be perhaps how the elements of time and nature, as well as the hands of humans, alter -- sometimes beautify, but sometimes destroy -- personal objects, the landscapes of water and earth, and the contingent elements that allow them to survive.

It is at the intersection of people and landscape that Odem’s works lay, engaging with domestic and organic objects and forms so as to reveal the perspectives with which we confront our environments, as well as to suggest opportunities for how that relationship could be improved. While centered on New Orleans and grounded in its land and history, Odem opens up a rich conversation about how landscape and peoples engage with one another, and the extent to which our connection and relationship to place may have to evolve.

Jennifer Odem, a longtime native of Louisiana, was born and raised in New Orleans. She took her BFA from the University of Louisiana and her MFA from Florida State University. She has held teaching positions in sculpture at Washington University, Webster University, and the University of Tennessee. Since 2015, she has taught art and sculpture at Xavier University in New Orleans. Odem was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Career Opportunity Grant in 2009 and has participated in notable artist residencies, such as the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida, and the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico. In 2017, Odem was commissioned to create the three-tower sculptural installation Rising Tables on the banks of the Mississippi River in New Orleans for the Prospect.4 Triennial, The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, which was curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, Director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

This exhibition has been co-curated by Bodhi Mathur and Sejin Yu.

For further information, please contact 511 Gallery at 212-255-2885 or via email at 511gallery@gmail.com